Plane crash or shark attack: Why not both? Harlin dives into ‘Deep Water’

Cinema | May 4th, 2026

By Greg Carlson

Leagues more entertaining than its logline and/or trailer might initially suggest, Renny Harlin’s “Deep Water” smartly avoids taking itself too seriously by fully embracing its delightfully trashy pedigree as a genre-bending mashup of classic disaster movie and shark attack chiller. Coming together under the big umbrella of the survival formula, the result of the cross-pollination is a pleasing diversion for moviegoers looking to shut off their brains for the respectably efficient 107-minute running time. The industrious Harlin, whose strong desire to continue churning out features connects forgettable stuff like “Refuge” and “Skiptrace” to the Hollywood peaks of “Die Hard 2” and “Cliffhanger,” has already directed two theatrically-released 2026 features with two more in post-production.

Re-teaming with Aaron Eckhart, who starred in Harlin’s “The Bricklayer” in 2023, the prolific filmmaker reaches all the way back to his 1999 sci-fi sharkstravaganza “Deep Blue Sea” to come up with several complications between humans and the shortfin makos who want to chomp them. The earlier movie, indebted to “Jurassic Park,” has become a cult item for wild onscreen deaths. While “Deep Water” doesn’t quite match its predecessor’s tongue-in-cheek self-parody, Harlin’s workmanlike cross-cutting and commitment to his stock-in-trade action beats check all the boxes for a good time at the multiplex.

The sizable squad of writers who worked on the movie did their homework before polishing a screenplay that brings together the white-knuckle fears of commercial airplane crashes and hungry maneaters like the delicious combination of peanut butter and chocolate. Eckhart’s Northeastern Airlines first officer Ben, struggling to deal with his young son’s cancer treatment, joins the cockpit of a Los Angeles to Shanghai flight captained by Ben Kingsley’s retirement-age Rich. The movie’s first major segments trace a malfunctioning phone charging cable that ignites a luggage container in the cargo hold. From there, Harlin pumps the adrenaline in a bravura sequence visualizing the chain reaction that starts with a spark and ends with a splash.

For my money, the screaming spectacle of the plane peril tops the subsequent shark encounters. Your mileage may vary. Just as in life, bad things happen to apparently good people, although movie rules insist from the first moment we lay eyes on him that obnoxious, self-centered heel Dan (Angus Sampson) — the unwitting culprit of the whole airborne catastrophe — will be a casualty of either the jetliner’s nosedive or the jaws of the waiting ocean predators. As for the rest of the souls on the passenger manifest, fickle fate will spare some while removing others from the board.

No disrespect to Australian veteran Kate Fitzpatrick, whose self-aware eye rolling as a flinty grandma occasions a winking Shelley Winters quip indicating some reverence for “The Poseidon Adventure,” but Harlin could have used several more Academy Award winners beyond Kingsley. Like the 1972 Ronald Neame/Irwin Allen classic and so many other disaster flicks, “Deep Water” employs the template in which small groups of key characters must solve predicaments that will claim lives en route to the eventual resolution. “Poseidon” boasted five Oscar-winning performers in its ensemble and Allen would return to the practice for “The Towering Inferno” in 1974. Imagine the fun if Harlin’s cast could have included Julianne Moore, Helen Mirren, Susan Sarandon and Dustin Hoffman!

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